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I don’t need a Steam Machine

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Re: I don’t need a Steam Machine

#171

Post by pwdisswordfishs »

deng wrote: post #153
tapoxi wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moore's Law is Dead (chip analyst YouTuber) believes a $300 bill of materials and $600, maybe even $450 for the lower SKU. The CPU and GPU in this are last generation, and he believes Valve got a bulk discount on unsold RDNA3 mobile GPUs. They did something similar with the Steam Deck riding off a Magic Leap custom design. People predicted that would be pricey too but launched with (and still has) a $399 model.

300$ BOM sounds incredibly low to me, especially now with the exploding prices for storage and RAM. Maybe they have already stocked up on it, but I doubt it. The huge heat sink also cannot be cheap. Then of course there's the whole tariff uncertainty. The lower SKUs for Steam Deck are sold pretty much with zero margin or even at a loss, as Newell said this was a strategic decision to enter the mobile gaming market. H…

The hardware does not compare favorably to a 2024 (current, in other words) Mac Mini.

Consider what the Steam Machine requires sacrificing:

- fewer USB-C connectors

- larger physical footprint

- can't buy and take it home today

It's hard to do an apples-to-apples comparison between the chips, but where one is better than the other on some dimension, it's offset by some other. They're approximately comparable.

Now, what's the price of the Mac Mini? $598.92

When people are talking about price points that have a higher margin than even Apple's devices have, you have to stop and consider whether people who are tossing around numbers like $750 with a straight face are actually trying to be rational but failing or they are just totally yielding to getting caught up in the hype.

Re: I don’t need a Steam Machine

#173

Post by hiddencost »

I'm considering moving my desktop to SteamOS, not just for gaming (web browsing, streaming from my jellyfin server). I have a laptop for embedded programming (and anything I do that needs serious compute I run on a cloud VM), I have dedicated hardware for Home Assistant.

I want to quit windows, but I'm always disappointed by running Linux that isn't backed by a company. I think Valve might be one of the companies I trust the most.

I kinda wonder if someone will start selling productivity tools on steam...

Re: I don’t need a Steam Machine

#174

Post by graemep »

tormeh wrote: post #40
torginus wrote: post #27

When I first saw the Arduino I didn't see the point - after all there were boards that cost less, did more, and the Arduino IDE seemed very barebones compared to what you could do with GCC and a custom toolchain. Then eventually I saw how much community support, ready made hardware emerged around it, to the point that after a while, not going the Arduino route was a decision you needed to justify heavily. Same thing…

> a comparable desktop experience to the commercial OSes Isn't it alteady comparable? My Linux desktop has almost the same game compatibility that Windows has, and none of the advertising and jank. Gone are the legendary days of xorg.conf. Linux has less problems than Windows now. Support from professional software vendors (Dassault, Autodesk, et al) and Nvidia could be better, admittedly, but these restrictions aren…

People will buy a Steam Machine who would not buy a Linux desktop.

The perception and the marketing are very different. it is small and looks like games console. This is something people will buy instead of a Playstation or a gaming PC. A lot of people buying it will not know what Linux is.

If you look at this page:

https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steammachine

It does not use the word "Linux" at all and only mentions Arch and KDE right at the bottom of the specs.

> Linux has less problems than Windows now.

I agree, and it has been my experience for the last few years. I am not a gamer nor do I use any of the software you mention so its even better for me. I am very glad not to be using Windows 11 from what I hear of it.

Re: I don’t need a Steam Machine

#175

Post by phito »

luqtas wrote: post #133
phito wrote: post #16

It's the same as the steam deck: I don't enjoy video games anymore, I've actually never really enjoyed gaming except for a handful of titles. But I'll be damned, I love that Valve is bringing gaming to Linux and I'll buy the hardware just to support the cause. The people in my life that have been using the "I need Windows for my games" reason (or excuse ;)) to not switch to Linux are now slowly but surely leaving Win…

wait, your going to buy Steam hardware to support Linux gaming? WFT. isn't the multi-million yatch Gabe bought enough? go donate to khronos or the wine team. maybe even Godot, which treats Linux as a 1° class citizen

Good point, I just made a donation to the wine team. I still think buying Steam hardware is a good way to signal to the market that I want to see more of this.

Re: I don’t need a Steam Machine

#176

Post by KronisLV »

SteamCube would have honestly been such a cool name.

My current PC has a Ryzen 7 5800X and an Intel Arc B580 and I don't really have the need for a device to connect to a TV (which I also don't have), but I can definitely see the appeal to something that is both okay at games, as well as has hardware that the software works really well with, with minimal amounts of driver weirdness. Not everyone views building or buying PC as non-intimidating, especially because of how many different parts of different specs and vendors are there.

I ended up getting a MacBook (M1 Air) and an iPhone (SE 2022) for some work stuff a while back, and while my use cases of those particular devices are a bit limited, I appreciate how most of the computing and updates out of the box... just work (at least for now, in contrast I got a bit unlucky with Windows updates on my main PC so I had to mess around with where the disk partitions are, otherwise it refused to boot after one update, no idea what's up with that).

Plus maybe it'll push developers in the direction of optimize their games a bit more (or at least add more performance oriented presets).

I just hope that they won't pull an Intel Core Ultra with the pricing, which will probably make or break the Steam Machine as something that'd see widespread usage.

Re: I don’t need a Steam Machine

#178

Post by tpoacher »

eigenspace wrote: post #64
mariopt wrote: post #12

Steam Machines can become an existencial crisis for PlayStation and Xbox. A “console” that I can use as a PC? I am in 100%. You’ll get the world biggest game library at a discount, this is why I sold my PlayStation after spending 200 euros and watching it becoming useless. I also suspect a lot of game devs will optimize for steam machine and finally we’ll get a console like experience on PC. Don’t let the “low specs”…

It's certainly not an existential threat to Playstation, but Xbox certainly has weakened itself enough that yes, this could be another nail in the coffin, given that their plan was to retreat into the Windows ecosystem. The low specs aren't a problem if it's cheap enough, but for every dollar this goes above the retail price of a PS5 will seriously hurt its mass appeal. The problem for Valve is that they can't really…

> If this thing is way cheaper than a regular computer of the same spec, corporations will just buy up Steam Machines by the palette load and use them as office machines or whatever

On one hand, this would be a problem.

On the other hand, if the Steam Machine doesn't support windows, businesses fleeing from MS Windows en masse because the Steam Machine is cheap would be a VERY interesting turn of events, and I'd be VERY curious to see how it all unfolds.

Re: I don’t need a Steam Machine

#179

Post by graemep »

socalgal2 wrote: post #92
Wurdan wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really get why people are calling it a console. It is a PC to me in all the ways that matter, and it's probably going to save me from spending 1500 euros on a mid-range gaming laptop that I don't really need. The only thing that I don't use my ipad for is playing games with my friends in other countries while we chat on discord. And the last 5 games we've played together do benefit from keyboard and mouse con…

To me, PC = Windows = Microsoft's Spyware and every other game company's anti-cheat root kits Someone might say I can install Linux on my PC but then I have to deal with maintaining it. So, what I hope the Steam Machine is, is effectively PC based console with no Microsoft, no root kits, and no maintainence.

> Someone might say I can install Linux on my PC but then I have to deal with maintaining it.

What maintenance do you mean? I do not know of an OS that does not require allowing updates to keep secure.

It definitely meets the other criteria you want.

Re: I don’t need a Steam Machine

#180

Post by pirates »

Aeolun wrote: post #158
cubefox wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wouldn't like Valve so much if you explicitly saw the 30% Steam tax, I mean fee, declared every time you bought a PC game on Steam. Imagine if Microsoft did that. +30% for every Windows software. Like iOS. Then Steam games would be +60% rather than +30%.

I don’t care about the Steam tax. Steam is one of the few storefronts that actually show me what I want. That give me the ability to download any game I downloaded 20 years ago when I first installed it. They went through a few dozen iterations of nonsense social stuff, but through that all the core functionality just kept working. I hate the iOS store because it’s full of ad-riddled slop. Steam isn’t remotely close…

Steam definitely has a ton of garbage, half-assed, slop games on it. They definitely were not made with time and love.
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